


heartlines

by meritmut



Series: i loved you well, when we were young [19]
Category: Marvel Cinematic Universe, Thor (Movies)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Canon Divergence, Angst, F/M, Flashbacks, Fluff, Romance
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2015-07-12
Updated: 2016-06-07
Packaged: 2017-11-20 22:19:37
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 8
Words: 6,859
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/590263
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/meritmut/pseuds/meritmut
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Sif x Loki memes and prompt fills.</p><p>
  <span class="small">i. grapholagnia ii. petrichor (1) iii. malapert iv. gymnophoria v. petrichor (2) vi. baisemain vii. 30-day meme viii. sacred</span>
</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. grapholagnia

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _grapholagnia_ : an urge to look at sexually-explicit, obscene, scatological, lewd, vulgar, pornographic, or offensive pictures.

When they ask him why he loves the library so, he has learnt not to answer in ways they will mistake.

No mention of the silence, the peace, the stillness of the air beneath those vaulted arches, no mention of the way the light glimmers through the high windows, turns every surface to a mellow gold and sparkles where it catches at dust-motes drifting in the sun. Nothing said of the way the written words therein inspire life in the corners of his mind he hadn't known existed.

Usually, he will say only that the airy hall offers secrets that may be found nowhere else - and secrets, or at least his love for them, they imagine themselves to understand well enough to enquire no more and leave him be.

They have no idea, not really, of the depth of those secrets held close to the heart of the citadel's ancient library, the secrets that Loki never knew existed until his teenage years when bravery won out over caution and he crept away from his dozing tutor to explore the hidden labyrinth where lie the books of mystic science and dark sorcery and - and intimate physiology.

Not that gone looking for that at first. He'd come across it purely by chance, an idea inspired by the etching of a sinuous female form in the illumination of another volume, an idea he'd found himself unable to quite forget.

He had traced a fingertip over her curving shape, wondered what the unfurling cloak of golden hair artfully inked in over her round hip might conceal (and here he'd blushed furiously and glanced over his shoulder, seized by paranoia that someone might surprise him in possession of what, at the time, had seemed like incriminating evidence of some dark twisted desire), and pondered the notion that the books further down from the surgical tomes might contain what he sought - information. Always information.

But though he had found many more illustrations both diagrammatic and artistic in nature (and some that were flagrantly erotic), and memorised their shapes and patterns even when sometimes the brazen style of them filled him with a kind of fascinated revulsion, neither the obscene nor the scientific left such a clear brand on his memory as that first had: that of the young woman with her silken, wheat-coloured hair concealing her modesty, only the curve of a hip and a suggestive pose to inflame the imagination. Loki had pored over volumes on biology (and found them sorely lacking - positively archaic, even) and art and mythology until the only knowledge of a woman's form he found himself wanting was how she might feel beneath his hands - oh, and he'd fought back the imagine of a specific woman, fought back an impulse and a wild fantasy because to immerse himself in books is and ever has been the _easier_ option. But she is on his mind, this golden-haired girl, on his mind and in his nervously thudding heart and echoed in every print on every page of all the books he finds in this secret quest for learning.

 _Secret_. The library breathes in secrecy for Loki now more than ever, filled with things forbidden and things delicious in their irresistibility, a taste of things he can only hope are to come. He isn't fool enough to imagine _she_ might be, the fair daydream transposed onto the etchings with her golden skin and her downcast gaze, but it's her familiar voice he breathes into this faceless future creation, her gait he gives to this chimerical figment when he studies the illustration and imagines how she might move - and, he supposes, _her_ eyes that gleam through the darkness if she were to hold herself above him on strong arms like the star-scattered vault of night, burn herself into him, let herself be memorised in the way these lifeless drawings have but give her consent to it, her _blessing_ , whisper _yes_ in the way those charcoal-and-ink-and-vellum creatures cannot.

I go to learn, he says, when they ask; it is a hunger, and I find I can never quite sate it.

Not everything worth learning's in your books, boy, says Volstagg with good cheer.

Her hair is golden rope against her spine, her eyes like shards of jade. Given time he could mix a pigment the precise shade of her stare, could calculate the gradient of her leather-clad waist and the magnitude of her white-toothed smile, Loki has made a science of wanting but no amount of dispassion will stifle it entirely.

No, he agrees, eyes following her across the field - no, but they are safer there.


	2. petrichor (1)

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _petrichor:_ the pleasant smell that accompanies the first rain after a dry spell.

Stretched out beside her lover she expands upon the ground, claiming the rain-soaked space and inhaling the sodden air as if to draw as much of the world as she can into her own lungs and keep it there. Loki reclines, his head resting on her stomach and his left hand idly playing with the fingers of her right, this careless ease a new thing between them. She had not expected it - had not expected anything to be easy once she accepted in herself that her feelings for the prince were more than what could be contained. He hadn't either, but for different reasons.

With the best will in the world Sif had expected Loki to make it difficult. She had expected their easeful camaraderie to dissolve into arguments, bickering and fights no different to a thousand others over the years, only intensified because everything about _them_  is intensified now. Loki is no longer just her partner in battle, the flicker of a wicked blade and the shift of enchantment where she might thrust up her shield to give him space to manoeuvre a killing blow. He is more now - he's her benign shadow, an echo of the cyclonic glaive she wields swivelling with fearsome swiftness to carve a path through adversity and reclaim the day. He is the ice that haloes the moon on nights when mist gilds the upper spheres of the realm; she is the trail of cosmic fire that trails in the wake of a burning frost-star; in one another they are a symbiosis, formed in the vital throes of the crucible of war and mischief.

He, in turn, had anticipated outside interference throwing stones in their spokes and making their new arrangement an impossibility; their closeness a futility. The two of them had had their expectations, and seen none met.

Instead there is only an exchange of gifts, given in split seconds snatched here and there to steal hungry kisses or promise-filled caresses, re-burn the brand into one another's skin with just the skimming of a finger down a cheek, the brush of a sleeve against a wrist noted with fizzling anticipation of later understandings. He has never thought so little of the general populace of Asgard, consumed as he is by this new level of introspective interest in another being - introspective because by this point, Sif is as much Loki as she is her own skeleton.

She lifts her right hand to run it through his hair; he brings her left to his lips and plants a mute kiss against her palm, and Sif breathes in the scent of the rain drying slowly in the grass, closes her eyes to the world and lets this rare contentment sink into her soul.

After this day, if she catches the aroma of earth after rainfall her mind will bring her back to it, and forever remind her of a peaceful morning and a slow-hummed song, and the coolness of her lover's touch upon her sated skin.


	3. malapert

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _malapert_ : clever in manners of speech.
> 
> (most of this was done with pyrotechnician during Skype RP)

"You truly expect me to believe you learned that from a _book?"_

Loki shrugs, a delighted smile curving and fading between heartbeats at the corner of his mouth. "Well, not entirely. The here-and-there of it can be found in any surgeon's handbook...though the rest I had to improvise."

"I'm not sure how I feel about you basing your techniques on what you picked out of a surgeon's handbook, to be quite honest."

"Yes, well, you seemed to enjoy it at the time."

"You'll have to show me these books of yours," Sif remarks, "I'm starting to wonder at the sheer extent of the information you seem to garner from them."

"I'd rather you didn't, truth be told - they are somewhat crude."

Frowning, she turns back to him, reaching up to unravel the coils of her hair from the red-laced net as she does so. "I think I'll have to read them for myself to judge that. You forget I've spent the better part of my life with men who can scarcely be called delicate."

He levels a weary glance at her. "Yes, but how many of those would you say had so much as _touched_  a book in their lives? There is a difference between the bawdy...ah, humour...of your barrack brothers, and the contents of these books. Anatomical accuracy, primarily."

"And yet apparently you can learn much the same thing from either. Why should I not strive to learn, as you do?"

It strikes Loki that Sif could never have kept up with him so in conversation, back when she'd first come to Asgard. Her wits have sharpened like knives on a whetstone in her time at court, her tongue a bitter lash sweetened only with the kisses she reserves for him, her words venom and honey as she chooses. There are times when he's not sure which he prefers.

"Because, speaking objectively...I see no need for you to do so. I read to learn, to improve my knowledge and skill, nothing more. Why should you bother in perfecting what is already without flaw?"

Another woman might have blushed at the comment, but Sif knows flattery for flattery's sake when she hears it and arches an eyebrow at him sceptically. However dearly he might think of her, he would never be so disingenuous as to call her 'without flaw'. He knows her faults; knows them and will not hesitate to point them out. It wouldn't be an equal relationship if one told garnished lies merely to appease the other's ego - Sif doesn't do it, so why should he?

"There goes that gilded tongue again," she says, "In one of its manifold uses. However if I should feel myself inadequate in any way, that is my concern. As it is, of this moment I do not, but that doesn't mean that I don't strive to be better - to be superlative to myself, and you know it."

"I do."

"And you also know, because you've said it many a time, that 'knowledge is power'. So why may I not seek both, as you have done?"

Smirking, a gleam in his eye that may only be described as lascivious and borderline predatory, Loki takes a step towards her. "But have you not also told me, on _numerous_ occasions, that it is the practical application of a skill that enhances it?"

Sif will not let victory slip so easily from her grip, not now that it lies so ready for her fingers to ensnare. She mirrors his slow smile and that languid pace that brings them closer together, leans in as if to kiss him - but turns at the last and places her lips by his ear instead.

"So why not put the books aside for tonight, and come practice?"

Satisfaction snarls hungrily between her hips at the lust that fills his eyes now, consumes the pallor of each iris in a blackened haze of desire though Loki, ever the last to admit defeat in a game of wills, holds himself motionless.

So Sif continues. "I simply meant that since practice makes perfect, and you and I are both perfectionists in every sense of the word...to leave my bed cold tonight would be nothing short of neglect. But do remember to lock the door this time."

Loki lifts a hand to run his fingers through her fine hair, soft as the night itself and so dark as to consume the candlelight in its oil-slick inky sheen. "I thought you enjoyed a little risk, dearest?"

"I enjoy a little risk, true enough. Just...not when we might otherwise spend the night uninterrupted. Would you not prefer privacy? Because I know I weary of wondering who at any moment might stroll in. Your guard can barely look me in the eye anymore, after last time." She prods him hard in the chest with her index finger and he chuckles, wincing slightly; his hands swoop to capture hers and bring her knuckles to his lips, affection and tenderness in his gaze now. Despite herself, Sif smiles.

"I don't know why you blame me for that," he points out, "I can really only claim half the credit."

With a snort she closes the distance so her mouth hovers scarce inches from his own. "It was your idea to use the ropes, Silvertongue."

"And what a fine idea it was. I find myself quite content to stand alone in all of Asgard as the one who bested the fierce Sif."

Sif laughs, tosses her hair at the remark - she knows, of course she knows, that in this particular instance, 'bested' must be replaced with another verb. "And yet I've outfoxed the trickster god more times than you have bested me."

With a wide smile Loki begins to walk them slowly backwards, towards the bed that Sif would not see left cold. "Well, perhaps tonight I'll prove the victor and break that streak - I do so love to best you, Sif. No other man may claim the privilege of having done so."

_Yes, 'bested' need definitely be replaced by another word, methinks._

Sif rolls her eyes. "And none but you shall ever have the privilege of _besting_ me. But if you're hoping to beat me in the tally, you must try harder - I have quite a lead on you, dear one. Think you that it can be surpassed?"

Loki shrugs, features alight with mischief at their easy wordplay. "I do not underestimate my own abilities - I stand no less of a chance than any man might. More so, even. Yet in truth, you of all the Æsir I think I would not bet against. Even when I happen to be your opponent. But then, you do make everything a contest..."

"Perhaps then the contest should not be of who 'bests' the other, but of a different kind? Maybe...a challenge of words? More specifically, of vocality?"

He looks a little surprised at her suggestion, but after a moment that slow smirk recurves itself across his pale lips and he nods. "My love, I think we have ourselves a game."

Sif only grins. "Do you really think you can win?"

"Oh, I know it."

"Then perhaps we should leave the door unlocked after a-"

A rough tug on her arms and Sif finds herself entrapped, pulled into him for a scorching kiss that takes her breath away and sets every nerve ending afire. It's only a taste of the white-hot witchcraft he can work with his tongue and yet she can't help but think that she's entered a game she cannot possibly win. She doesn't let on that such a notion crosses her mind, of course; that would be no better than surrendering outright, but the thrill of the challenge races down her spine as Loki pushes her further back, back until her legs collide with the bed.

"Let them hear if they will, and let them investigate if they must. It's not their coming I'm concerned with."

She kisses him with the kind of unbridled passion that might send a weaker man to his knees, and pulls back to enquire innocently of him, "Then whose?"

The ferocity of his gaze alone near pins her down to the furs, the cold heat of his need for her evident as he lowers and leans to drop slow, teasing kisses across her bare collarbones. "No other's," he murmurs into her skin, "Fairest Sif."

She can't help the faint sounds of approval that escape her lips at his ministrations, but knows she can elicit the same and more from him with little enough effort. No, the game has not begun quite yet. "Then carry on, Silvertongue, let us see who can win this war of ours."

"I wouldn't deserve the name if I lost, now would I?"

His fingers trail down across her breast to unlace her tunic in the slowest, most taunting manner possible; his lips follow the removal of the garment, skimming lightly over her ribs, her stomach...

"Indeed you wouldn't," she replies, voice a little breathy. "But I alone know how best you use it." She raises her hands above her head to allow him an unimpeded view of her body, and he could swear her eye flickers in a fleeting wink as she closes them to the room.

He places one last kiss on each of her hipbones and draws back to brush his lips against hers. "You are divine, you know."

"I know," she intones sarcastically, "So worship me, mortal."

He can only laugh at that, and she does too, her eyes opening again as she twines her arms about his neck. "You shouldn't grow complacent, Sif. Complacency means forgetting that the roses you lie on may yet wield thorns." He accompanies this warning with a nip to the flesh of her throat and she gasps in shock, her arms tensing about him.

"You talk of thorns," she bites, "But I feel only softness. Soft as petals."

He stirs at that and presses himself against her, lets her feel his hard length against her thigh to prove that  _softness_ will not be an issue tonight. "Not for naught am I called 'liartongue', Sif. Oft-times, the truth you see before you is not so real as you might think."

And, retreating down over her once more with outright war in his eyes, Loki dips between her thighs, pushes her skirt aside, and puts that liar's tongue to good use.


	4. gymnophoria

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _gymnophoria_ : the sense that someone is mentally undressing you, or that a person is viewing you naked even though you are clothed.
> 
> (fills this prompt too: "sparring - loki doesn't mind losing to sif")

Steel flashes; sunlight blazes and sweat sticks on gleaming skin as Sif powers through a series of patterns with her longsword, as fleet-footed and swift as she is deadly. For the first time in many months, it seems, her movements carry not the taut tension of a warrior exorcising her frustrations in a (relatively) harmless environment: instead, lithe in her leggings and jerkin, she is a dancer made of light upon the slow-baked dirt.

She twirls - twists effortlessly and brings the glittering length of ice-white steel crashing down onto her opponent's hastily shoved-up shield. The blade flares out in the sun and sparks with her explosive energy.

The goddess of war crackles with life, uncoiling from each step like a serpent striking, a dark grin in place of the tight-jawed mask she's worn since they brought him back. 

Thor sighs - this, at least, should be considered progress. Sif had not taken the return of the fallen prince well and her anger has borne her along for weeks; she burns more fiercely than her fellows, this hot-blooded thing, and while the sense of betrayal (of mistrust) lingers in the minds of the warriors like embers going cold, Sif's temper remains as keenly-stoked as ever. 

Or it had done. Today she seems different.

She ignores the presence of her friend on the steps and continues as if she were alone with her sparring partner - though she isn't, and not just because Thor has sought her out for her tacit company. He tires of the senseless noise at court just as much as she does and longs for the uncompromising camaraderie down in the barracks: neither speak, but it is companionship enough. It's not Thor that she would take issue with. It's the other, loitering on the corners of her mind and hovering in the shadows beyond the courtyard, it's _him_ , refusing even in his incarceration to leave them a moment's peace.

She can feel his eyes on the back of her neck - all over her, crawling down her spine and sinking his fanged stare into her flesh. It only pushes her on and she forces her opponent backwards until they reach the opposite side of the yard and she wishes she had him (the other, whose name she cannot think of without spitting fire in her mind) there to bruise up a little.

It doesn't take much imagination to transplant his face onto Rorik's, and give him the hiding of a lifetime.

Two weeks ago, Thor brought Loki home to Asgard and still he is kept in the citadel's gaol. She has been assigned to his guard detail during the nights and the sight of him, white and skinny and brittle in his smugness, had been enough to drive the fury from her that first time. Shock had taken over, something verging on pity - but no, not pity. Sif does not pity the undeserving. She had, she thinks now, simply acknowledged for the very first time that perhaps she was not in possession of the full tale; that Loki's side remained untold.

She had not asked to hear it, after that, but if he ever offered to speak, then...well, she would endeavour to listen. She owes him that much. She owes his mother more, for Frigg he will not so much as look at.

Shame? It cannot be hatred, not for the queen. Not when he so clearly loathes Sif and all she stands for now, and yet will answer her (for even insults and barbed comments count as conversation with him).

The sensation of malevolent eyes ripping into her leathers, dragging them from her body and scouring the skin from her bones soon evaporates Sif's steady mood, and before long Thor notes that steely set to her jaw return, the line of her shoulders too tense, the aggression in her movements far beyond the ferocity required for the spar. He knows without having to ponder (because wouldn't he do the same? Doesn't he?) that the face of his brother has replaced that of staunch Rorik in Sif's mind.

With a cry she strikes again, more she-bear now than viper, and Thor rises from the steps to call her name.

"My lord?" The blade freezes in its descent as she twists to him and cocks her head questioningly.

"To me," he raises his own sword, a monster of dark steel, and beckons her forwards. Behind her Rorik heaves a sigh of relief and departs for the armoury to get the nicks in his blade seen to.

"Was I doing it again?" she asks, flipping her braided hair back over her shoulder.

Thor snorts at the rueful smile on her face - a contrast to the irritation still simmering away behind her eyes. It's always been this way: however infuriated she may be with his brother, she will never let it spill over to burn Thor too. The love between them runs too deep for Loki's poison to touch. "What has he done now?"

Sif shrugs, shakes her head slightly. "Only be his usual insufferable self. But..." she seems to consider something, a thought that had not occurred to her before, "...is that not a good thing? If he's beginning to mock and scorn as he used to, to seek reactions to his bile - surely -"

"It means he isn't entirely lost?" Thor offers gently.

"Well - yes. Sometimes I see him, or what he was, at least, behind all that - that  _anger_. Sometimes I think he might be the same person, and I know it's foolish because he _is_ the same person, only - only changed."

And how changed. Their conversations (however brief) have become more vindictive duels of the wit, their fights, once blazing rows pitting two souls of fire against one another, reduced to spats of bitterness and cruelty that neither can win, nor claim to feel any joy from seeing the other lose.

She used to enjoy sparring with him - he was one of the few she could be sure would never let her beat him out of some misplaced chivalrous grace.

_"You'll have my head, one of these days," he'd laughed, leveling his blade at her. Grinning, she had extended her sword and swiped it, slid it the length of his and back again as if sharpening it. And it was already sharp, sharp as the bite of her smile and the glint of his eyes._

_There had been a ruthless, brutal kind of neatness to this duel, colder and more alien to the vigorous physicality of Asgard. Swordplay...no, they favour wrestling here, but Sif loves all things well-made and a sword no less for its impersonal way of dealing death. Her blade, made for two hands and light in her grip, was an extension of her own being rather than the deft tool he made of his, it will always be more natural in her hands than Loki's though he without effort could probably dismember half of his father's Einherjar._

_She wouldn't tell him that, though. Wouldn't stoke his ego so._

_Thor would laugh when she put him on his back. Loki merely smiled, and found some devious way to reclaim lost footing. Then she'd beat him again, and on it would go._

Steel flashes, sunlight pains her eyes for the nights she spends in darkness with the prince, the weight of this responsibility sticks to her skin. The eyes on the back of her neck belong to Rorik as he makes his way home and glances her way, not to Loki (Loki rots in gaol now and calls it the greatest victory she will ever claim from, in that sour way of his that makes her itch to scratch those eyes of his out), and Rorik looks at her only with the familiarity of an old comrade. Now even he is gone, and it's just Sif and Thor, standing at odds in a way neither can bear.

_The greatest victory Sif ever won over Loki, according to him, was that she kept the key to his release for three years and yet refused its use._

But Loki kept her by his side for three years, too, and forced her to listen where he had things to speak of, and that was a victory of its own kind.


	5. petrichor (2)

The wind trembles in the grass - a faint whisper, no more, a breath across the plains she has claimed for her own this day. She presses herself close to the warm ground, flattening herself into the earth until the blades tickle her nose and the damp dirt beneath pervades her senses. Life shivers in her veins, the blood in her ears a drumbeat pushing her on in the hunt - yet still she remains perfectly still, but for the curling of her fingers in the grass, hooking into the earth as her other hand grips her spear close to her side.

Today, War has donned the teeth and claws of a prowling lioness, and stalks a prey most of her wiser brothers would shy to chase. But size has never intimidated Sif, and the great stag's antlers would, she thinks, look fine indeed upon her mantel.

What the beast is doing out here in the grasslands was the subject of much discussion last night, leaving only the conclusion that the sweeping rainstorms and flooding in the forested valleys north of Vanaheimr's capital city had driven the highland game down onto the plains, where they've become easy enough prey for the visiting Æsir.

She's upwind of the enormous white stag, but the only odour she can pick up on the breeze is that of last night's rain, cloying and warm as it dries upon the sun-baked earth. No matter. She doesn't need the beast's scent to track it when it moves so openly among the grasses. Slowly, gradually, with the sun intense on her neck and the wind tempering its heat to a gentle warmth, she feels herself begin to unwind into the elements that caress her. This, the calculating liberation of the solitary hunt, is where she belongs.

Here in her home for the first time in so many years, and it's as if she'd never left.

She pauses, lifts her head the tiniest fraction above the earth - and the beast moves with her and tosses its great head nervously, sensing the presence of the patient predator there among the whispering grasses, but Sif is already in motion. The muscles in her legs tense and push her forwards as she uncurls from the ground and transforms in a surging leap. The lioness, she is the sun-bleached bones of hunger and fierce pride and the wild blade of death on the plains, her spear twirling above her in a mortal dance - a limitless extension of her own lithe being. She draws it back and, with a great cry, lets it fly towards her quarry, staggering forwards a few steps with the force of the throw.

She regains her balance in time to see the spear take the beast in the shoulder and send it crashing down, bellowing in pain and fright. Without hesitation she draws her slender knife, crosses the dirt to its side and kneels to draw the blade across its heaving throat in a single movement, fluid as the rains themselves as they'd come thundering through the hills and driven the stag from its home. Blood taints the sweetness of the dirt beneath her nails as she brings the back of her hand across her face to wipe clear the spatter of her conquest, and suddenly War is woman again, the claws withdrawn.


	6. baisemain

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> _baisemain_ : (historical) in feudalism, homage which the vassal used to give to the fief seigneur, by kissing his hand / polite manner to greet or leave a lady, by kissing her hand, hand-kissing.

The night out here is all-consuming, of a darkness deeper than any Asgard has ever known, and Loki finds a sort of serenity in the vastness of it. Serenity and excitement, a strange magic of conflicting sentiments, for anticipation weights the cool air as if the watchers on the lakeshore have drawn a collective breath, expecting something more of the night sky than the spray of silver-blue stars and the lone glistening half-moon that gild it now. 

The surface of the lake shimmers faintly, not with phosphorescence but with the reflection of the cosmos soaring high above, perfect in its own satiny stillness – until the first fuse is lit, and suddenly the darkness comes alive.

Crimson, emerald, violet, gold…such colours as have never painted Asgard’s skies with intensity to match explode across the Midgardian heavens, fleetingly lighting upon the faces of the watchers down below. All of them, gathered on a Scandinavian midnight by the calm water, huddle together against the pervasive chill. All save Loki – all save Sif, and their daughters.

It had been Jane, once again, who had invited them. It usually is, even if the intention is Darcy’s, it’s always Jane who forwards the message through Thor, who never seems to mind being treated like a trans-realm carrier pigeon. He is, Sif thinks as she marvels at the deep ruby-red stars studding the night, probably just relieved that there are messages to relay in the first place. That his beloved is happy to extend welcome to Loki, after everything, is progress enough to astonish most of the Midgardians who still view him with - at the least - mistrust.

And of course, once the children had gotten wind of the nature of Jane’s invitation – fireworks, Sif had informed them with some misgivings – there had been no refusing it, and so on the evening of the Midgardian New Year, down they had come in borrowed garb (upon wearing jeans for the first time Ari declared that she’d never wear anything else, and wondered aloud if they came in purple). Ullr had vanished who knows where, more than likely to see if the Avengers' bowman had come out for the party, but the girls had stayed, and together they’d found a space not too far from the bonfire to be unsociable, but not so close that they couldn’t pretend they were alone.

They end up divided, pulled in twain by the warm bodies of their two youngest perched between them on the rug, but neither can complain. The girls are small and slender things, and without difficulty Loki may reach behind them to take Sif’s hand and envelope it in his own. He does so, tangling his fingers with hers and though she doesn’t look at him – her gaze is captivated by this pyrotechnic display put on by their hosts, bright blossoms of flickering fire illuminating her golden-lit eyes in the darkness – her hand is warm and her grip firm, her smile a gentle thing on her parted lips. At peace for once Loki drinks it in, stores it away inside and draws Ari further into the curve of his arm.

She’s like him, a cold presence in the midst of all this Siffish heat (he remembers countless long nights when the bed he shares with his wife would be invaded, and the press of the other two, their curly-haired daughters with an impossibly perfect conflagration of ice and flame in their veins, was an uncomfortable, wonderful furnace he would endure without protest) and he feels the need to offer her warmth he doesn’t even possess in his own body. She shuffles close, rests her head on his chest, and here by the water of an alien realm, he is home.

“How do they do it?” she murmurs, quiet enough that he alone hears. She hates to admit her ignorance, even of a world not her own where she can hardly be expected to know much.

“Some alchemy,” Loki mutters back, “once it’s done, I shall find out.”

“And tell me,” she presses, determined that he shouldn’t withhold secrets of learning. As if he would, he thinks to himself; as if he _could_ from his sharp middle daughter.

“And tell you.”

“Good,” says she firmly, and he chuckles, pressing a kiss to the top of her head. She wriggles a bit in complaint, but it’s only a token protest against her father’s infrequent and disconcerting open gestures of affection.

“It’s like a dragon’s breath,” Brenna, on his other side, notes with wonder in her voice. “Do they have dragons?”

“No, little one,” Thor, approaching across the gritty sand of the lakeshore, stoops to pluck her from the ground and set her on his shoulders that she might better watch the display. “Why don’t we go and find your aunt, and ask her of this mortal witchfire.”

Brenna claps her hands at that, and for a moment Ari shifts as if she might join them, but then she settles back again.

“Not want to go?” asks Loki.

She shrugs delicately. “You said _you_ would find out.”

Sif smiles at that and he catches it out of the corner of his eye. It’s a soft thing, filled with the kind of contentment – and contentment to _be_ content – that Sif had never expected to feel. She has always sought action, danger and to an extent chaos, upheaval…something to make war on and conquer. A challenge. But now the challenge is nothing more and nothing less than normality, how might Sif, fierce swordswoman of Asgard, and Loki, her rise-and-fall mate, adapt to a life of stability and settlement with their family? The answer can only be – with the same resolve, swiftness and skill that they do all things.

Whether it's the sweet clarity of the smoke-scented air or the strange wonder of sitting here with Ari and Rún between them, Loki is consumed with a sense of utmost fortune that all things have transpired so well. It could have gone so differently and yet here they are; here Sif is at his side, where she always promised she'd be, though admittedly she had sworn it has his warrior-love rather than his wife and the mother of his children.

And here he is, still around to see it, though the powers above might have had it otherwise.

They don't shape themselves so much as shape the world around them, as they have always done, and as Loki leans back a little to bring Sif’s hand up, brush her scarred knuckles with a tender kiss and meet the liquid darkness of her eyes with his own, he thinks this is a fine world indeed they have made for themselves.


	7. 30-word meme

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> More old updates. (Three years old. Jesus.)

_**beginning** _

Winter is not a time for death. A time of endings, maybe, but by the time the first snows fall and the wind whistles down the vale to rattle the last leaves from the skeletal sycamores, and the low sky hangs heavy with pale bars of a thickly translucent interglacial light, death in her dark cloak has come and gone. Winter is the in-between of seasons, an un-birth and an un-death where the womb of the world flickers with a life little seen elsewhere. Winter is a time when somnambulant stirrings mark change in the brittle air and a taste of rebirth in the seeking tendrils of green, fighting their way to life beneath the hoarfrost’s glassy veil, wreathing mists upon shaded lawns and fleeting halos of shimmering light in her hair as he presses his lips to it, traces the curve of her jaw with cool-skinned fingertips and welcomes this new thing of theirs.

Winter is not a time for death. Winter is rebirth and it is evolution; it is the beginning of all things, and so it is for them.

_**accusation** _

It’s a hard space between them, the memory of that night. She hasn’t forgiven it, he hasn’t forgotten the fury on her face as he’d spoken those words, heard them echo out into the rafters and shake the listeners to their collective cores. As if they hadn’t already been well and truly shaken by the foul vitriol he had poured upon them, one and all. He smirks at the memory, flinches as her wrathful glare pins him to the wall from years away even as she scowls at him now. 

He should’ve known she would hate him for it. After all, isn’t he the one who boasted of his familiarity with her? He alone knows, he’d declared, the name of her love - a greater claim on the workings of her heart than any made before or since, by anyone in Asgard. It was more than a boast, though, it was an accusation that he’d hoped would ruin her. He had hoped to pin her to the wall in the sights of gods and giants because of them all, the judgement in her eyes was the hardest to bear.

 _Her love beside Thor._ He made it sound like an insult.

To Sif, it had probably become one.

_**restless** _

The sheets are damp with cooling sweat; she’s been tossing and turning again. She always has been a rough sleeper, snatching hours here and there while Loki would pass entire nights and sometimes even mornings at her side, oblivious. He sleeps like a felled ogre – one night when even the strongest infusion she knows how to make couldn’t send her off she had sat up, book in her lap, and been amazed at how little he’d moved. But for the gentle rise and fall of his chest he might have been a pale statue curled beside her, eyelashes casting streaky shadows across his cheekbones and his lips parting every so often with a breath.

Watching him had soothed her a little, and so it does now: her pounding heartbeat, her racing mind tune themselves to the slower rhythm of Loki’s breathing and eventually she feels the faded darkness of the winter night encroach upon the corners of her consciousness. She slips down beneath the sheets and twitches them to rights again, turning onto her side to face him. Whether disturbed by the movement or the shifting covers Loki stirs, his eyes fluttering open to focus instantly on her face.

“Again?”

She nods into the pillow. Loki frowns. He raises himself up onto his arm, creates a space for her and gestures with his chin for her to move.

“Come here.”


	8. sacred

**Summary for the Chapter:**

> Five-sentence meme.

They choose a moonless night, a small hour and a lonely place, the intrigue lending a reckless edge to the anticipation that sits low in his belly - he is _giddy_ with waiting, the night is slipping by but he turns at last toward the sound of footsteps and -

_\- there you are._

There’s blood on her brow (not hers), a fierce joy in her eyes that cuts straight through his chest to wake the sleeping fire in his heart (hers, oh, _unreservedly_ hers) and he’s already moving, crossing the grove in quick strides, her mouth widens in a smile and he _longs_ but Loki flexes his restraint, arms still at his sides as he goes to his knees before her.

(Here at the truest seat of faith he knows.)

Her fingers drag through his hair and she regards him with such _warmth,_ curling a fist at his nape with the kind of gentleness she reserves only for these interludes of grace.

The inside of her wrist is the first marker: he turns his head to plant a kiss there.


End file.
